The humerus bone of a brand new pangolin species was discovered at Graunceanu, a well-known Pleistocene fossil deposit in Romania, confirming its existence in Europe.
Deeper evaluation of fossils from certainly one of Jap Europe’s most vital paleontological websites has led to the invention of a brand new species of pangolin, beforehand thought to have existed in Europe in the course of the early Pleistocene however not confirmed till now.
“It’s not a flowery fossil,” stated Claire Terhune, affiliate professor of anthropology on the College of Arkansas. “It’s only a single bone, however it's a new species of a form of a bizarre animal. We’re pleased with it as a result of the fossil report for pangolins is extraordinarily sparse. This one occurs to be the youngest pangolin ever found from Europe and the one pangolin fossil from Pleistocene Europe.”
The newly described specimen for the fossil pangolin species Smutsia olteniensis. Credit score: Photograph by Claire Terhune, College of Arkansas
The bone, a humerus — or higher arm bone — got here from Graunceanu, a wealthy fossil deposit within the Oltet River Valley of Romania. For practically a decade, Terhune and a world group of researchers have targeted their consideration on Graunceanu and different websites of the Oltet. These websites, initially found due to landslides in the course of the Nineteen Sixties, have produced fossils from all kinds of animal species, together with a big terrestrial monkey, short-necked giraffe, rhinos and saber-toothed cats, along with the brand new pangolin species.
Claire Terhune, College of Arkansas. Credit score: College of Arkansas
“What’s particularly thrilling is that though some work within the Thirties steered the presence of pangolins in Europe in the course of the Pleistocene, these fossils had been misplaced, and different researchers doubted their validity,” Terhune stated. “Now we all know for positive that pangolins have been current in Europe round no less than 2 million years in the past.”
Fashionable-day pangolins exist in Asia and Africa. Also known as scaly anteaters, they appear considerably just like the armadillos that roam the southern United States. With scales from head to tail, they're generally mistaken as reptiles, however trendy pangolins are literally mammals and are most carefully associated to carnivores. They're additionally among the many most illegally trafficked animals on the earth. In keeping with the World Wildlife Fund, the eight species of residing pangolins on two continents vary from “weak” to “critically endangered.”
The brand new pangolin fossil is between about 1.9 to 2.2 million years previous, inserting it inside the vary of the Pleistocene Epoch, which ran from roughly 2.6 million years in the past to about 11,700 years in the past. The identification of this fossil as a pangolin is important as a result of earlier analysis steered that pangolins disappeared from the European paleontological report in the course of the middle-Miocene, nearer to 10 million years in the past. Earlier work hypothesized that pangolins have been pushed towards extra tropical and sub-tropical equatorial environments attributable to international cooling tendencies.
Because the youngest and finest documented fossil pangolin from Europe and the one fossil from Pleistocene Europe, the brand new species revises an earlier understanding of pangolin evolution and bio-geography. Smutsia olteniensis, as the brand new species known as, shares a number of distinctive traits with different residing members of the genus Smutsia, that are at present discovered solely in Africa.
Reference: “The youngest pangolin (Mammalia, Pholidota) from Europe” by Claire E. Terhune, Timothy Gaudin, Sabrina Curran amd Alexandru Petculescu. 21 December 2021, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2021.1990075
This work was printed within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Terhune’s collaborators have been Sabrina Curran at Ohio College, Timothy Gaudin the College of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Alexandru Petculescu at Emil Racovita Institute of Speleology in Bucharest.
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